RTA HealthLine buses heading in opposite directions pause at a bus stop near Playhouse Square on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. In Detroit, the M1 light rail line will start construction on Woodward Avenue soon. / The Plain Dealer

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

A woman sits inside a newly constructed bus stop near East 40th Street on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland in January 2008. Five years later, development has improved four miles of the city's main street. / AP

Ida Byrd-Hill

CLEVELAND — If Detroiters wish to know what benefits may come from the new M1 light rail line that will soon start construction on Woodward Avenue, they need look no further than Cleveland.

Cleveland’s HealthLine, a bus rapid transit system that connects downtown Cleveland with the hospitals and universities in the University Circle district four miles to the east, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. And in those five years, ridership has soared 60% from the first year and development along the route has boosted property values more than 300%.

No longer does Euclid Avenue, the main drag on which the HealthLine runs, resemble a barbell with heavyweight anchors on either end but nothing but vacancy in the middle, said Tracey Nichols, Cleveland’s director of economic development. Now Cleveland’s Midtown district is filling up with new mixed-income housing, an entrepreneurial incubator hub and other development.

And along the way, Nichols said, Cleveland learned some things about what works in inner-city development.

“It’s not any one bricks-and-mortar project,” she said. “It’s more of a public-private partnership. No one’s taking credit, no one’s worrying about ‘No, we did that first.’ People are really working together to make things work.”

Detroit civic leaders express equally high hopes for the M1 Rail project, a 3.3-mile streetcar line that will run along Woodward Avenue from downtown to New Center, paid for with money from business leaders, the Kresge Foundation, the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and the federal government. Construction is expected to begin in the next few months and be finished in 2016.

What works to revitalize cities was the focus of a two-day summit in Cleveland last week organized by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and urban expert founded the nonprofit research and strategy group in 1994.

Speaking to the hundreds of public officials, leaders of nonprofit groups, and others attending the conference, Porter said urban revitalization has taken longer than anyone ever expected.

“We thought we’d be done in a decade. It didn’t turn out that way,” he said.

But the good news is that by now cities have a good idea of what works, Porter said. Upgrading infrastructure like Cleveland’s HealthLine or the planned M1 rail line in Detroit is important. So is having anchor institutions such as universities and hospitals spend as much of their procurement dollars as possible with local contractors and suppliers in their immediate inner city neighborhoods.

Wayne State University and other Detroit anchor institutions are already doing some of that with their procurement policies and their Live Midtown incentive program, which gives employees subsidies to live near the school. In Cleveland, anchor institutions have promoted the Evergreen Cooperatives, neighborhood businesses that supply solar energy and laundry services.

Cities need to encourage even more of that, Porter said, adding, “Every city needs a company support strategy.”

Cities can help small businesses flourish by connecting them to capital sources and creating incubators for entrepreneurs and management training programs to give business founders the skills they need.

Porter cautioned that failing to get even one piece of the puzzle right — transit, say, or workforce training — can scuttle a city’s revitalization efforts.

“Everything matters. The productivity of a region is often set by the weakest link,” he said. “You’ve got to get all these things right.”

Cleveland’s HealthLine shows that detailed planning can pay off. The city created new zoning rules requiring developers building along the route to build their projects right up to the sidewalk with parking behind the building to avoid the look of suburban strip malls. The city’s Regional Transit Authority even commissioned more than 100 new trash bins with a snappy design for the route. Playing off the hybrid design of the bus rapid transit vehicles, which run on tires like buses but use dedicated lanes like a train, the HealthLine’s slogan is “It’s not a bus. It’s not a train. It’s the future.”

A lot of the discussion at the two-day ICIC summit centered on local food economies and the promise they hold for new jobs in cities like Detroit. Dan Carmody, president of the Eastern Market Corp. in Detroit, told the conference that the term “urban agriculture” doesn’t begin to capture the variety of food industry jobs that could be created if cities sourced more of their food locally.

Right now, Carmody said, most people get only about 3% of their food from local sources, and the rest comes from distant locales like Mexico or California. If that increased to 20%, he estimated it would create 5,000 jobs and $125 million in new household income for Detroiters.

In that discussion and others, Detroit played a starring role in the ICIC summit. Several of the innovative programs highlighted at the conference were Detroit based, including inVenture Trip, a nonprofit effort led by Ida Byrd-Hill, president of Uplift Inc., to turn young black male drug dealers into legal business operators.

“A drug dealer is simply an entrepreneur who is selling the wrong product,” she told the conference.

And Lindsay Aspegren, a partner in Project Green House in Detroit, described a plan to divert 90% of demolition debris from blight removal efforts from landfills into a recycling pipeline. “We can scale this throughout the Great Lakes region,” he told the conference.

Matt Camp, president of the ICIC, said the strong Detroit presence at the summit reflects the spirit of innovation in the city.

“I think that there’s a lot of energy and ideas happening right now in Detroit,” he said. “It’s almost like a nice little incubator itself.”

No one questioned that Detroit and other post-industrial cities still face hard times, or that political dysfunction is holding cities back. In the end, though, the innovations just may add up to a revitalized city. Savvy investors are paying attention, said Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber.

“What we’re hearing is that Detroit is not considered a safe bet,” Baruah said at the end of the ICIC summit, “but it is considered a smart bet right now.”